Anyone for tennis?  This puzzle was published on Ladies Finals Day at Wimbledon.

We were told that 14 of the 44 clues contained a misprint with the correct letters spelling out the topical request of the title.  We were also told that six thematic clues (unaffected by misprints) had to be ’smashed’ - a good tennis term - before entry.  These smashed entries were all to be real words.  That information helped me.  Further, another thematic phrase (9,9) would be found hidden symmetrically in the grid - except for one letter in each word.  Finally we had to locate the eight letters of each word and draw a line in the shape of each missing letter, to connect each set (tennis again).

There was a lot to take in and I didn’t get the tennis link for a while.  I got it from the misprinted letters which I realised about half way through were going to spell out>

NEW BALLS PLEASE?

The six words that were smashed, all had meanings which could be interpreted as ball, so we were smashing balls.

The six words before smashing were:

GLOBE - ball

GRUB - a ball that travels along the ground, e.g. a grub kick in rugby

LEATHER - the ball in certain games, e.g. cricket

CALTROP - an iron ball with four spikes

PROM - a school or college dance, or ball.  Chambers says it is an American usage but it seems to be coming more prominent in this country.  Terry Wogan’s listeners recently claimed that they had heard of Nursery School children who would be having a leaving prom this summer before moving on to their next school.

DANCE - again, ball in the sense of gathering for dancing.

These were all smashed into real words as shown in the table below.

When the grid was full, the concept of Wimbledon was firmly entrenched in my mind so I went searching for Ws.  There was only one towards the north west corner and I was able to trace out WIMBLEDN in an anticlockwise direction in adjacent two letter horizontal and vertical chunks.  This was balanced by FRTNIGHT in a clockwise direction in the symmetric south east corner. Both words were shaped as balls.  The missing letter was clearly O - more references to balls.

At this point, I was slightly confused as to whether I should draw one or two circles (or balls) to join WIMBLEDN and FRTNIGHT.  In the end I went for a single ball as the preamble said draw a line, not draw lines.  Also this circle was centred exactly in the middle of the grid.

I solved this in a couple of sessions of a couple of hours each.  I took some time to get going.  Although some of the misprints stood out clearly, others did not.  The misprinted clues were by no means evenly spread through the fourty four possibilities.  Also some ‘obvious’ misprints weren’t misprints at all.

Overall this was an enjoyable puzzle with a very topical theme and a number of clues that gave satisfaction when I cracked them.